Challenges and Strategies for Acquiring Adjectives

Children acquiring language must learn a variety of words mapping on to different kinds of concepts. Typically, word learning accounts focus on how children strategically acquire words for entities (nouns) and events (verbs). Often underrepresented are word for properties (adjectives). While adjectives, like verbs, may trail behind many nouns in early production, and may not always be required to refer or express truth-conditional meaning, they are essential for distinguishing among entities and events in the world, and communicating clearly in disciplines such as language arts and science. Moreover, nearly every language has the grammatical category of adjectives. It is therefore critical to know what challenges children face in acquiring adjectives, and what supports their acquisition. Here, I outline three main aspects that, together, render the process of learning adjectives both vexing and linguistically intriguing. First, there is cross-linguistic variation in how languages around the world treat words for properties. Second, the syntactic position of adjectives varies across and within languages, and is often correlated with subtle differences in meaning. Third, within the category of adjectives, a wide range of meanings may be encoded. I review findings across these areas that document children's successes and challenges with these aspects of adjective distribution and meaning. To counter these challenges, I end by covering three effective and empirically documented strategies for adjective learning, which rely on attending to key information in both the linguistic and extralinguistic context. I close with a brief discussion of prospects for future research on this topic.